Vehicles operating in an autonomous mode (e.g., driverless) can relieve occupants, especially the driver, from some driving-related responsibilities. When operating in an autonomous mode, the vehicle can navigate to various locations using onboard sensors, allowing the vehicle to travel with minimal human interaction or in some cases without any passengers.
Motion planning and control are critical operations in autonomous driving. Conventional autonomous driving techniques are a planning dominated in common planning and control system, which means planning phase decides the path and speed while the control phase only executes it. FIG. 1A shows planned speeds for an autonomous driving vehicle as planned by a planning module. However, such a design results in an inevitable oscillation in control, which may leads to uncomfortable to the passengers as shown in FIG. 1B. As shown in FIG. 1B, the throttle commands according to the planned speeds as shown in FIG. 1A are not smooth or linear, which may cause uncomfortable to the passengers.